A major thesis of gender conflict in Nigeria is the oppression of the female by the male, but the discursive involvement of women in the question of their disempowerment has not received adequate scholarly attention. This study consequently investigated the assertiveness content of Nigerian women's linguistic and pictorial self-representation in Nigerian newspapers. It specifically assessed the women's empowerment level over a decade after the 1995 Beijing Conference. At the conference, the mass media was accused of habitually misrepresenting women, linguistically and pictorially, to perpetuate the perceived oppressive patriarchal order.

Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis was used to broadly interrogate women's power location in Nigerian newspapers. The data, which were women's particular linguistic and pictorial self-expressions, were collected from seven purposively selected Nigerian national newspapers: New Nigerian, Nigerian Tribune, The Comet, The Guardian, The Punch, ThisDay and The Sun, covering 2005-2006. The theta theory of Chomsky's Transformational-generative Grammar (TGG) was used to assess the women's central cognition in the articles' titles, while Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar was utilised to interrogate the transitivity, modality and theme-rheme structure of the sentences within the texts. The TGG's lexico-semantic groupings of women's columns were also employed to ascertain their present preoccupations, while Barthes' semiotics of images was used to assess women's postural self-representations in newspaper pictures they voluntarily submitted. Percentage scores and qualitative discussions were used for data analysis.

The women appeared linguistically and pictorially self-assertive, while their underlying cognition seemingly indicated consent to patriarchal hegemony. With 65.4% agentive roles, women were most frequently 'agent', while the qualitative interrogation of the sentences suggested that their agency was superficial. The 78.0% occurrence of transitive clauses depicted high frequency of assertiveness in women's verbal choices, but the qualitative analysis revealed their verbs as apparently conciliatory. The 25.3% high incidence of obligatory modals in relation to women showed qualitatively that the women were seemingly induced to act in particular ways rather than voluntarily. Women were frequently 'themes' in 73.1% of the clauses, but the qualitative investigation showed that this position did not guarantee their always being in charge. Generally, their verbal choices in sentences depicted women, vacillating between empowerment and disempowerment, consistently using self-effacing modal verbs, for instance: had to, couldn't say, would have loved to; and intransitive verbs such as suffering and feel (guilty). The women's columns on issues that had general social concerns totalled 39.8%, compared to 60.2% on fashion and relationships, indicating a slight shift from their previous almost exclusive preoccupation with fashion and relationships. The pictorial analysis manifested women with sexually suggestive self-projection in angular postures and clothing choices, which subsume the cognition of the sexually enticing female.

Women are key contributors to their continued non-empowerment through negative linguistic and pictorial self-representations that suggested their acceptance of the patriarchal 'status quo'. The Beijing Conference on women empowerment is yet to significantly impact the current linguistic and pictorial self-representations of Nigerian women in selected newspapers. Women's verbal and pictorial choices in media discourse should therefore become more positively self-assertive to project true empowerment.